IPL 2022: Aaron Finch Roped In By Kolkata Knight Riders As Replacement For Alex Hales

Australian opener Aaron Finch will be joining Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) for the IPL 2022 season as a replacement for England opener, Alex Hales, who pulled out of the tournament due to bubble fatigue.

Hales is the second English player to do so after Jason Roy took an indefinite break citing the same reason. In Hales’ stead, Finch will fill in. He played for Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) in his previous stint.

The Aussie World Cup winning-captain will be joining at a price of INR 1.50 crores. He went unsold in the mega auction that was held on February 12 and 13 in Bengaluru.

9th IPL Team For Aaron Finch:

Additionally, this will be Finch’s 9th franchise in the IPL, making him the player to have played for the most number of franchises. He was part of Rajasthan Royals (2010), Delhi Daredevils (2011,12), Pune Warriors India (2013), SunRisers Hyderabad (2014), Mumbai Indians (2015), Gujarat Lions (2016,2017), Kings XI Punjab (2018), Royal Challengers Bangalore (2020), and now finally he will be playing for Kolkata Knight Riders (2022).

Earlier, he had announced that he will not be playing first-class cricket again. Finch doesn’t see himself playing Test cricket anytime soon so he would rather make way for youngsters looking to make their mark in the red-ball format.

KKR splurged their money on Indian batter, Shreyas Iyer, with a view on making him the captain and the anchor in the team. They also managed to buy back Australian Test captain, Pat Cummins, for INR 7.25 crores.

Notably, they had retained four players – Andre Russell (INR 16 cr), Varun Chakravarthy (INR 12 cr), Venkatesh Iyer (INR 8 cr), and Sunil Narine(INR 6 cr). They have managed to fill up their entire 25 slots and had a purse of INR 55 lakhs remaining by the end of the auction.

Kolkata Knight Riders squad for IPL 2022:

Ajinkya Rahane, Venkatesh Iyer, Shreyas Iyer, Nitish Rana, Sam Billings, Andre Russell, Rinku Singh, Sunil Narine, Pat Cummins, Shivam Mavi, Varun Chakravarthy, Sheldon Jackson, Anukul Roy, Rasikh Dar, Baba Indrajith, Chamika Karunaratne, Abhijeet Tomar, Pratham Singh, Ashok Sharma, Aaron Finch, Tim Southee, Ramesh Kumar, Mohammad Nabi, Umesh Yadav, Aman Khan.

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